Iranian Green Revolution & the Dusk of Divine Leadership

In June,Tehran was turned into a battlefield between an outcry against fraudulent democracy and the power of state persecution over the future of Islamic Republic of Iran. The results: democracy is officially dead, if only to be faked, state terror, mass political disillusion, and the end of an era of divine legitimacy that used to define leadership of the Islamic Republic.
My Iranian colleague told me: It is a coup from within. With 3 to 4 thousands of people being arrested, tortured, raped regardless of sex, hundreds of people murdered, we are just waiting to see Mousavi and Rezaee be arrested, probably in the following weeks.
My friend expressed his fear: “It is possible, although it is also what I fear most, that Iran is gonna become another North Korea.”

“It is a coup from within,” He said.
The reformists are not some entirely new forces outside of the political structure. Look at the most powerful opposition leader, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who was once the Prime Minister before such a position was abolished altogether in 1989, a dear friend of Khomeini, and one of the main figures in the Islamic Revolution. Khomeini’s death incurred the changing leverage among the internal fractions of the political structure. Certainly, young forces were constantly drawn into social movements for a free and fair election. The turnout rate of the 2009 Presidential Election was unprecedentedly high, as was the scale of later protest against the legitimacy of the re-elected President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Yet no matter what the savage crackdown could mean, a coup or a reconstitution, it has irretrievably stained the name of Iran, on top of the superficially demonized image that parts of US mainstream press only care to reveal. Most importantly, it crushed the dream that thousands of thousands of Iranians who aspire to live in and build a better country.
The image we saw in the first 3 days of the election: free press, public expression, open challenge to the authority, and voluntary voting. All of the sudden, journalists were kicked out, so that the violent quash launched by the state could be brought in smoothly without any interference, interruption, and any substantial opposition.
But really, Ahmadinejad is not the only one, let alone the first one, to use sexual violence as part of the means to seize the power. More than 2 decades ago, when Khomeini was purging the influence of Communist Party, a number of state agents married Communist women, carried out the copulation, and got them killed the next morning — for according to an Iranian Shiite belief, the women could have gone to heaven if dying with virginity. The authority had to make sure that they not just only purged communists out of the country, but also out of heaven altogether.
Nevertheless, that sort of atrocity, among other forms of crime that state used to consolidate its political power, was mainly targeted at Sunni, Kurds, and other minorities in Iran. Now what it is happening, unlike the 80s, is that the state freely stretches its claws to ravage, pretty literally, the mainstream Shiite Muslim communities among those who are found to have something to do with the protest. Actually, it is reported that some Lebanese Palestinians were imported and trucked into the country to be full-time state agents assigned with a mission to rape and kill people. The deep injustice some Palestinians have suffered for decades was shaped into a loyalty to their best friend, financially and ideologically, the Iranian government, that they are willing to do anything at any cost to repay its kindness. It is not surprising, then, if one happens to see some Hezbollah affiliated show up on the streets of Tehran.
As long as oil is an extremely profitable revenue, even if not sustainable in the long run, with the development of nuclear weapon and its currently abhorrent political orientation, Iran could well become a candidate of the next North Korea. Let’s hope not, despite the fact that sometimes hope just isn’t doing anything formidable before a concentrated abuse of power. Do millions of Iranians need to launch another revolution? The words of my Iranian friend, for his security that I should avoid his name, summarized people’s attitude this way: “In the past, people would rarely challenge the leadership of the Republic in public. Now they not only condemn it, but in fact curse it.”